Homily for Evan Cheung’s Memorial Service

Author’s Note: On Monday, June 5, 2023, Evan Cheung, a beloved student leader at our church, took his life by suicide. Evan’s parents, Andrew ...

God’s Restless Love

Introduction

Have you ever heard the phrase that “love will make you do some reckless things”? How many of you have ever experienced a love ...

Love Conquers Envy

Preacher’s Intro:

This sermon on how love conquers envy was part of a sermon series on how grace covers our shame.

The remarkable response to Brené ...

A Bad Day

Introduction

As we walk thru life all of us are going to have some good days, some average days, and some bad days.

One of my bad days happened ...

What Is Love?

Introduction

All of us have a working definition of love in our minds. Love is one of those words that we instinctively know what it means. We ...

A Song of Contentment

Introduction

One of my favorite films of all time is Chariots of Fire. Chariots of Fire is based on the true story of two runners named Harold ...

When the Heat Is On

Introduction

Have you seen the famous photo from 1936 of a huge crowd of people all saluting Hitler, but one man stands out. Why? He keeps his ...

Advent Conspiracy: Love All

Introduction

Every Christmas there is that one toy that everyone wants and that creates all sorts of craziness.

In 1983 it was the Cabbage Patch Doll! The ...

Back to the Start

Introduction

Merry Christmas! One thing is for sure, Christmas is looking much different than of us expected this year. But I wonder if that’s actually ...

Outrageous, Miraculous Love

Introduction

In the fall of 2001, I was a senior in college. Because of where my college was located, I was an hour and a half away from my hometown ...

More Than Your Personal Savior

Introduction

For over three decades, Paul Harvey made a name for himself by telling “the rest of the story.” Day after day he came on our radios ...

Hope in a Time of Anxiety

Introduction

I know a woman who is a working professional, she’s the mother of young children, a wife, and she recently contracted COVID-19 which ...

Hope in the Present

IntroductionIt’s a popular statement. I heard it years ago though I’m not sure who first said it.: Human beings can live for 40 days without ...

Worthy Is the Lamb

Introduction

John, who is in prison at Patmos, writes letters to the church of Ephesus and churches that surround it. His goal is to comfort them and encourage ...

Paying Attention to God

Introduction

The Christian life is about a muscle. Simon Vay said that the only way we can love people is if we know how to pay attention. The most generous ...

My Name Is Nicodemus

Introduction (Framing the sermon)

This morning I will be doing something different in the sermon. I will retell the gospel story from John 3 through the ...

Filled with All the Fullness of God

Introduction

(Read Ephesians 3:14-21)

We are often impressed and inspired to greater heights of living as we observe the world around us. Many times, we ...

My Name is Hosea

Introduction

My name is Hosea. My profession is prophet of the Lord Jehovah. My prophetic ministry took place in the northern kingdom of Israel between ...

How to Love the Lord Your God

Introduction

(Read Deuteronomy 11:1-7)

I want to label the message "How to Love the Lord Your God." In the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses has already ...

God's Love Language

Introduction

Why does it take so long to learn how to love the important people in our life? Am I the only slow learner in this crowd? When our kids were ...

Looking Otherward

Introduction

Many years ago, I had dinner at a place called Windows on the World. The restaurant sat atop a skyscraper so high that the wait staff literally ...

The Love Reaction

Introduction

(Read 1 Thessalonians 3:6-10)

A single mother struggles to pay for a college education for her only child. She hates her job but knows she ...

The Love Expression

Introduction

(Read 1 Thessalonians 3:1-5)

God is the source of love, Jesus is the proof of love, and believers must be the agents of love in this world.

The Love Connection

Introduction

Dick Purnell, in his 2003 publication Finding a Lasting Love, makes the following statement: "We all need to love and accept the love of other ...

The Lawful Pleasure of Praise

Introduction

The key insight of this sermon is this: God will lavish his people with praise on the Last Day. Those who are in Christ can expect to find ...

The Mighty Warrior Who Saves Moms

Introduction

We're going to land on Zephaniah 3:17 today, but we're going to take a while to get there, because we can't appreciate what's going on when ...

A Song for All People

Introduction

On a Sunday morning in 2013, two Muslim suicide bombers entered All Saints' Church in Peshawar, Pakistan and detonated the explosives, ...

Learn God's Law

Introduction

We naturally like to hear of philanthropy, of charity, of giving. Our hearts may be warmed as we hear of Bill Gates or Warren Buffett choosing ...

How to Look at People with God's Eyes

Introduction

You may remember that in Jonah 3 there was this great revival in Nineveh. And usually when there's revival there's also great joy in the place ...

Party of Three

Introduction

Oprah recently interviewed Diane Nyad, the 64yr old who completed a 53 hour solo swim from Cuba to Florida. In the interview Nyad said that ...

The God Who Sees Me

I am very aware that Mother's Day isn't easy for some people. I have talked to two moms this morning who said, "I didn't want to come. ...

The Perfect Meal for Sinners

Introduction

When our daughter Bonnie celebrated her first birthday we threw her a huge birthday party. We put on silly hats, blew on little horns, waved ...

What's the Big Deal with "John 3:16"?

The story behind the sermon (Craig Brian Larson)

The background of my approach to this sermon: As I began work on this sermon, I realized that it has been ...

A View from the Choir

The story behind the sermon (Bryan Wilkerson)

After doing first person narratives at Christmastime for many years, I was running out of characters—the ...

Broken and Repentant

Introduction

Last week I talked about the road to compromise and the road to integrity. We are either on one or the other. David eventually walked the ...

You Are So Welcome

The story behind the sermon (by Mark Buchanan)

This sermon opened a quick series that kicked off our fall 2011 ministry. The immediate background (which ...

The World's Best Love Story

Introduction

Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that the entire world loves a lover. And if he was right that all the world loves a lover, then the best loved ...

God Is Self-sacrificing

Introduction: Recovering a knowledge of God

As wonderful as life is in so many respects, many of us look at our world today and wonder how we are ever ...

God Is Love

Introduction

God is love. This is the characteristic of God that we will explore today in our Discovering God series. The fact that God is love means that ...

The Power of a Blessing

Introduction

Nancy and I had gotten married and were celebrating our first Christmas together. I was in grad school. We had no money at all. There was ...

Falling Madly in Love with God

We'll be looking at Ephesians 3:14-19 today. Paul says, "For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and ...

Deep Truth

Liz is friends with people of many religious backgrounds, and she's just starting to realize that what she claims to believe about Jesus necessarily has ...

Deep Love

I want to know what love is.

Sooner or later, it had to come around to love. For six weeks now, we have been considering tests of true faith—the ...

The Assurance of Blessing

Story behind the sermon (David Shelley)

My challenge: This was the final sermon in a series on the Ten Commandments from Deuteronomy 4-6. I wanted to explain ...

God Is Still Loving

There are times in our lives when it seems like God is against us. I mean, we know that God is for us, but there are times when it seems like God is treating ...

The God Who Shines Like the Sun

Introduction

One Friday night I was getting in a little exercise. It was a rainy and cloudy day, but just around dusk, the sun came out for a short time. ...

Love is More Than a Feeling

For a word that we use so often, love is a very difficult word for us to define. I looked up love in the dictionary on my shelf, and found that it is ...

Don't Think for Yourself

Introduction

Undoubtedly you have seen the movie The Dead Poet's Society. In that movie, an energetic teacher at an exclusive prep school is depicted as ...

Givers and Takers

Introduction

My son is the assistant manager of a Potbelly's sandwich shop in the northern suburbs of Chicago. When you ask for a glass of water, most ...

The Hard Side of Epiphany

From the editor:

January 6th is Epiphany—the day that many Western Christians commemorate the visitation of the Magi to Jesus. With that date just ...